Metaphors structure our perceptions and understanding
Thinking of marriage as a “contract’ leads to one set of expectations, while thinking of it as “team play” or “Russian roulette” will carry out different sets of expectations
Lakoff and Johnson do not use formal empirical evidence
How we talk about things shapes how we think about them
All about connotation—love is a journey, life is a journey, social organizations are plants, love is war, etc.
Argument is war—your claims are indefensible. He attached every weak point of my argument. I demolished his argument, etc.
We don’t just talk in these terms, we BEHAVE in them .
Arguments usually follow systematic patterns
We highlight and hide according to consistency with the metaphor. So if we use argument as war, we lose sight of the cooperative aspects of argument.
Concepts are only partially structured by metaphor, cannot be the thing.
Uses Reddy’s Conduit metaphor as example of subtle hidden meaning. WE become so convinced by the beautiful conduit metaphor that we see naught else. Loses implied meaning and past meaning—apple juice seat.
But the metaphor may be unpacked differently by various listeners, depending on the standpoint, lost by conduit metaphor.
Orientation metaphors—whole system of concepts with respect to one another most with spatial orientation—up, down, in , out, front, back on , off deep shallow, central peripheral.
These arise from the fact that we have bodies of the sort we have and that they functio0n as they do in our physical environment. Happy is up, sad is down. Conscious is up, unconscious is down—wake up. More is up, less is down, future is up, past is down, but what about down the road? Me. Many of these are culturally embedded.
Our values are not independent and must form a coherent system with the metaphorical concepts we live by.
The various subcultures of a mainstream culture share basic values but give them different priorities
Ontological metaphors
Orientation with things outside our bodies. Inflations is an entity, we need to combat inflation. Allows us to quantify, identify, set goals.
The mind is a machine; we grind out a solution, I’m a little rusty today, I’m running out of steam.
Container metaphors land areas. There’s a lot of land IN Kansas
Personification, nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics and activities. Killer tornadoes. Inflation has us pinned to the wall.
Metonymy The ham sandwich is waiting for his check—calling a person a thing.
Challenges. Looking ahead to following weeks.
There may be conceptual groundings up alive down dead—buried.
Argues there is no objective truth, against western culture, but there are truths. Metaphors seek a truth, through categorization.
Like Berlin says objectivism and subjectivism myth, but does not go into transactional
Says Aristotle appreciated metaphor and had a theory of how they work, but this was ignored.
Says fear of metaphor and rhetoric in empiricist traditions fear of subjectivism.
Says Plato bans poetry and Aristotle engages it.
Calls for experientialist syntheses to bridge gap between objectivist and subjectivist with the metaphor.
Lakoff and Johnson Metaphors We Live By (1980)